The truth is, that when you come to criticise certain modern enormities your instrument fails. The thing is too big for you altogether.
You can pick up a cricket ball with your hand; you can handle a ten-foot spherical buoy with a crane. But how are you to deal with a rounded mass several miles across? How are we to deal with mountains of ineptitude? How is criticism to approach those last new literary moods which are deaf to the ancients? I fear it cannot deal with such moods at all. If a man feels like that, he feels like that, and one can say no more. And if there is to come a time when men shall read:
Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem,
and make no more of it than "Passengers must cross the line by the bridge. Penalty £5," why, there it is! Things have their rising and their setting. But before that day comes may the earth cover me.
* * * * *
If the modern world resembled that ancient one of which the echoes, as I lay down my Virgil, still move my mind, I should here complete, I should here end. For I have said all that I have to say. And a very good thing it would be if the modern world resembled the ancient world in this as in many other things. Their books were ten thousand words long, or twenty thousand words long, or fifty thousand words long, or a hundred thousand words long. They had not to conform to a special length. And so it was with that which they wrote down, as I am writing this, at random, a vagary of the mind.
But the modern world differs from the ancient world, and there is a law that an essay such as this (essay, forsooth!) should reach a certain length.
There are various ways in which I could pad it out. One of the best would be to quote you a few lines and ask you how you feel. For instance:
Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud me
Munera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus.